Do you "hunger" for revenge against someone who has wronged you? Do you dream about what sort of nasty retaliation you'd like to inflict upon someone - all in secret, of course, meaning you would only enjoy the fruits of your vengeance at a distance? If so, you're not alone. Most people are like this and far from being immoral, it seems to be a natural and even functional part of who we are.

The News-Tribune explains:

Acts of personal vengeance reflect a biologically rooted sense of justice, they say, that functions in the brain something like appetite. Alternately voracious and manageable, it can inspire socially beneficial acts of retaliation and punishment as well as damaging ones. The emerging picture helps explain why many people who think they are above taking revenge find themselves doing nasty, despicable things, and how unconscious biases pervert what is at bottom a socially functional instinct. ... Retaliatory acts, anthropologists have long argued, help keep people in line where formal laws or enforcement do not exist. Recent research has shown that stable communities depend on people who have "an intrinsic taste for punishing others who violate a community's norms," said Dr. Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Using brain-wave technology, Dr. Eddie Harmon-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has found that when people are insulted, they show a burst of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is also active when people prepare to satisfy hunger and some cravings. This increased activity, Harmon-Jones said, seems to reflect not the sensation of being angry so much as the preparation to express it, the readiness to hit back. The expression itself is all pleasure. In one recent experiment, psychologists demonstrated that students who were ridiculed were far less likely to avenge themselves on an offensive peer if they had been given a bogus "mood-freezing pill," which they were told blocked the experience of pleasure.

Being hungry is normal, but satisfying hunger to excess causes problems; the same is true when it comes to a desire for justice. It’s not only normal to hunger for justice, it’s appropriate as well — human society would never have developed and survived without this desire. Trying to take justice to excess, though, only ends up causing more problems than it solves.

This has a lot of interesting implications, I think. First, it’s a piece of the puzzle explaining how morality evolved in humans. Second, it suggests that a lot of the negative emotions and feelings needn’t be bad so long as we are conscious of what is happening and learn how to harness them productively. Finally, it might have implications for how we construct our formal justice system. We shouldn’t shy away from designing punishments for the sake of some revenge — this would likely increase people’s confidence in the system. At the same time, though, we should recognize our own inclinations to excess and make every effort to see that it doesn’t occur.

The desire that revenge occur in secret, though, is curious. People hunger for justice, but they don’t want it to become public knowledge that they saw justice done. It makes sense when someone wants an “excess” of justice, but why do they want it when the punishment fits the crime? Is this something unique to modern society or did things used to be different back when this sort of “justice” was more of the norm in terms of how human communities maintained order?

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics
• Ethics and Culture